Category Archives for Airlines.
Unsurprisingly with so little demand for air travel airlines are doing their best to get workers to take leaves and early retirements. United has a new offer that includes airline elite status and miles.
Ellen Church was a pilot and a nurse. She sought a pilot job with United Airlines (then Boeing Air Transport) but got nowhere. Then she suggested the airline hire traveling nurses, helping to ease the fear of flying people had so early on in aviation.
She was hired in 1930 as head stewardess and she then hired seven other women on a three month trial basis. They formed the ‘original eight’ of what would become flight attendants.
Vietnam, like Taiwan, is so far one of the great COVID-19 success stories. Despite sharing a border with China they have fewer than 300 confirmed cases and not a single reported coronavirus-related death. And they’re going to some extreme lengths to keep it that way.
A Vietnam Airlines pilot from the U.K. is the most critically ill patient with the virus in the country right now.
Airlines receiving the first tranche of government bailout money are required to continue serving nearly all of the cities they flew to prior to the pandemic. In exchange for billions of dollars to fund payroll, the government required that the nation’s air transport system remain intact.
Despite some exemptions from the Department of Transportation, airlines are getting creating launching new short flights to efficiently meet these obligations at the lowest possible cost. And reportedly that means a new, shortest domestic route from American Airlines.
On Tuesday American Airlines moved operations in San Francisco to the Harvey Milk Terminal, B side of terminal 1. This puts all of American Airlines in one terminal at the airport, instead of having the old US Airways gates a long walk away.
The new ticket counter location is between doors 3 and 4 of the terminal. Their gates are B22 – B27, which despite the move doesn’t give them room for growth. The opening date for the new Admirals Club, across from gate B13, hasn’t yet been announced.
More than 650 of Delta’s planes are parked, but in another sign that airlines believe their future is going to be smaller than their past – at least for the foreseeable future – the airline has decided to retire its fleet of 18 Boeing 777s.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian sent a memo to the airline’s employees about the decision, and the internal document was shared with me by a source.
At American Airlines some of the required hours didn’t get paid during the mid-May pay cycle, and in fact many flight attendants whose scheduled flights were all cancelled received $0 checks. Others who got some pay appear to be missing hours. Many American Airlines employees will have to wait to get paid because the airline’s pay systems weren’t programmed to handle the way they’re currently paying employees.
According to the Senior Vice President of Air Operations at the American Airlines wholly-owned regional carrier Envoy Air, “all of the E-175s and E-145s that we parked as a result of COVID-19 [are expected to be] returned to service by June 3.”
In addition all of the 20 Embraer 175 regional jets that had been operated by Compass are being brought into the Envoy Air fleet “over the next few months.” The first one, aircaft N208AN, was sent to Abilene for conformity checks by Eagle Aviation Services prior to entering revenue service.
Five Senators want customers to get their money back for trips they voluntarily cancelled, because we bailed out the airlines and because people need the money.
Since this is proposed by 5 Democratic Senators in a Republican Senate, and two are potential VP nominees, the chances of passages are zero.
Travel isn’t returning quickly to China, and if you want to see what two months into our future looks like the Chinese experience is certainly one clue. So is the risk of continued flare ups in the virus, which will scare people even further away from flying.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
